This file contains information on Emacs developer processes. For information on contributing to Emacs as a non-developer, see (info "(emacs)Contributing") or http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Contributing.html * Information for Emacs Developers. An "Emacs Developer" is someone who contributes a lot of code or documentation to the Emacs repository. Generally, they have write access to the Emacs git repository on Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=emacs. ** Write access to the Emacs repository. Once you become a frequent contributor to Emacs, we can consider giving you write access to the version-control repository. Request access on the emacs-devel@gnu.org mailing list. Also, be sure to subscribe to the emacs-devel@gnu.org mailing list and include the "emacs-announce" topic, so that you get the announcements about feature freeze and other important events. ** Using the Emacs repository Emacs uses Git for the source code repository. See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GitQuickStartForEmacsDevs to get started, and http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GitForEmacsDevs for more advanced information. Alternately, see admin/notes/git-workflow. If committing changes written by someone else, make the commit in their name, not yours. Git distinguishes between the author and the committer; use the --author option on the commit command to specify the actual author; the committer defaults to you. ** Commit messages Emacs development no longer stores descriptions of new changes in ChangeLog files. Instead, a single ChangeLog file is generated from the commit messages when a release is prepared. So changes you commit should not touch any of the ChangeLog files in the repository, but instead should contain the log entries in the commit message. Here is an example of a commit message (indented): Deactivate shifted region Do not silently extend a region that is not highlighted; this can happen after a shift (Bug#19003). * doc/emacs/mark.texi (Shift Selection): Document the change. * lisp/window.el (handle-select-window): * src/frame.c (Fhandle_switch_frame, Fselected_frame): Deactivate the mark. Below are some rules and recommendations for formatting commit messages: - Start with a single unindented summary line explaining the change; do not end this line with a period. If that line starts with a semi-colon and a space "; ", the log message will be ignored when generating the ChangeLog file. Use this for minor commits that do not need separate ChangeLog entries, such as changes in etc/NEWS. - After the summary line, there should be an empty line, then unindented ChangeLog entries. - Limit lines in commit messages to 78 characters, unless they consist of a single word of at most 140 characters; this is enforced by a commit hook. It's nicer to limit the summary line to 50 characters; this isn't enforced. If the change can't be summarized so briefly, add a paragraph after the empty line and before the individual file descriptions. - If only a single file is changed, the summary line can be the normal file first line (starting with the asterisk). Then there is no individual files section. - If the commit has more than one author, the commit message should contain separate lines to mention the other authors, like the following: Co-authored-by: Joe Schmoe - If the commit is a tiny change that is exempt from copyright paperwork, the commit message should contain a separate line like the following: Copyright-paperwork-exempt: yes - The commit message should contain "Bug#NNNNN" if it is related to bug number NNNNN in the debbugs database. This string is often parenthesized, as in "(Bug#19003)". - Commit messages should contain only printable UTF-8 characters. - Commit messages should not contain the "Signed-off-by:" lines that are used in some other projects. - Any lines of the commit message that start with "; " are omitted from the generated ChangeLog. - Explaining the rationale for a design choice is best done in comments in the source code. However, sometimes it is useful to describe just the rationale for a change; that can be done in the commit message between the summary line and the file entries. - Emacs generally follows the GNU coding standards when it comes to ChangeLogs: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html or "(info (standards)Change Logs"). One exception is that we still sometimes quote `like-this' (as the standards used to recommend) rather than 'like-this' (as they do now), because `...' is so widely used elsewhere in Emacs. - Some of the rules in the GNU coding standards section 5.2 "Commenting Your Work" also apply to ChangeLog entries: they must be in English, and be complete sentences starting with a capital and ending with a period (except the summary line should not end in a period). They are preserved indefinitely, and have a reasonable chance of being read in the future, so it's better that they have good presentation. - Use the present tense; describe "what the change does", not "what the change did". - Preferred form for several entries with the same content: * lisp/help.el (view-lossage): * lisp/kmacro.el (kmacro-edit-lossage): * lisp/edmacro.el (edit-kbd-macro): Fix docstring, lossage is now 300. (Rather than anything involving "ditto" and suchlike.) - There is no standard or recommended way to identify revisions in ChangeLog entries. Using Git SHA1 values limits the usability of the references to Git, and will become much less useful if Emacs switches to a different VCS. So we recommend against that. One way to identify revisions is by quoting their summary line. Another is with an action stamp - an RFC3339 date followed by ! followed by the committer's email - for example, "2014-01-16T05:43:35Z!esr@thyrsus.com". Often, "my previous commit" will suffice. - There is no need to mention files such as NEWS and MAINTAINERS, or to indicate regeneration of files such as 'configure', in the ChangeLog entry. "There is no need" means you don't have to, but you can if you want to. ** Generating ChangeLog entries - You can use various Emacs functions to ease the process of writing ChangeLog entries; see (info "(emacs)Change Log Commands") or http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Change-Log-Commands.html. - If you use Emacs VC, one way to format ChangeLog entries is to create a top-level ChangeLog file manually, and update it with 'C-x 4 a' as usual. Do not register the ChangeLog file under git; instead, use 'C-c C-a' to insert its contents into into your *vc-log* buffer. Or if 'log-edit-hook' includes 'log-edit-insert-changelog' (which it does by default), they will be filled in for you automatically. - Alternatively, you can use the vc-dwim command to maintain commit messages. When you create a source directory, run the shell command 'git-changelog-symlink-init' to create a symbolic link from ChangeLog to .git/c/ChangeLog. Edit this ChangeLog via its symlink with Emacs commands like 'C-x 4 a', and commit the change using the shell command 'vc-dwim --commit'. Type 'vc-dwim --help' for more. ** Branches Development normally takes places on the trunk. Sometimes specialized features are developed on separate branches before possibly being merged to the trunk. Development is discussed on the emacs-devel mailing list. The trunk branch is named "master" in git; release branches are named "emacs-nn" where "nn" is the major version. If you are fixing a bug that exists in the current release, be sure to commit it to the release branch; it will be merged to the master branch later. However, if you know that the change will be difficult to merge to the trunk (eg because the trunk code has changed a lot), you can apply the change to both trunk and branch yourself. It could also happen that a change is cherry-picked from master to the release branch, and so doesn't need to be merged back. In these cases, indicate in the release branch commit log that there is no need to merge the commit to the trunk; start the commit message with "Backport:". gitmerge.el will then exclude that commit from the merge to trunk. ** Other process information ** Emacs Mailing lists. Discussion about Emacs development takes place on emacs-devel@gnu.org. Bug reports and fixes, feature requests and implementations should be sent to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, the bug/feature list. This is coupled to the tracker at http://debbugs.gnu.org . You can subscribe to the mailing lists, or see the list archives, by following links from http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=emacs . To email a patch you can use a shell command like 'git format-patch -1' to create a file, and then attach the file to your email. This nicely packages the patch's commit message and changes. To send just one such patch without additional remarks, you can use a command like 'git send-email --to=bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org 0001-DESCRIPTION.patch'. ** Issue tracker (a.k.a. "bug tracker") The Emacs issue tracker is at http://debbugs.gnu.org/. The form presented by that page allows to view bug reports and search the database for bugs matching several criteria. Messages posted to the bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org mailing list, mentioned above, are recorded by the tracker with the corresponding bugs/issues. GNU ELPA has a 'debbugs' package that allows accessing the tracker database from Emacs. Bugs needs regular attention. A large backlog of bugs is disheartening to the developers, and a culture of ignoring bugs is harmful to users, who expect software that works. Bugs have to be regularly looked at and acted upon. Not all bugs are critical, but at the least, each bug needs to be regularly re-reviewed to make sure it is still reproducible. The process of going through old or new bugs and acting on them is called bug triage. This process is described in the file admin/notes/bug-triage. ** Document your changes. Any change that matters to end-users should have an entry in etc/NEWS. Doc-strings should be updated together with the code. Think about whether your change requires updating the manuals. If you know it does not, mark the NEWS entry with "---". If you know that *all* the necessary documentation updates have been made, mark the entry with "+++". Otherwise do not mark it. Please see (info "(elisp)Documentation Tips") or https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Documentation-Tips.html for more specific tips on Emacs's doc style. Use 'checkdoc' to check for documentation errors before submitting a patch. ** Test your changes. Please test your changes before committing them or sending them to the list. If possible, add a new test along with any bug fix or new functionality you commit (of course, some changes cannot be easily tested). Emacs uses ERT, Emacs Lisp Regression Testing, for testing. See (info "(ert)") or https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/ert/ for more information on writing and running tests. If your test lasts longer than some few seconds, mark it in its 'ert-deftest' definition with ":tags '(:expensive-test)". To run tests on the entire Emacs tree, run "make check" from the top-level directory. Most tests are in the directory "test/". From the "test/" directory, run "make " to run the tests for .el(c). See "test/Makefile" for more information. Tests which are tagged ":expensive-test" are enabled additionally, if you run "make check-expensive" from the top-level directory. "make " as mentioned above incorporates expensive tests for .el(c). You can also define any ert selector on the command line. So "make check SELECTOR=nil" is equivalent to "make check-expensive". You could also use predefined selectors of the Makefile. "make SELECTOR='$(SELECTOR_DEFAULT)'" runs all tests for .el(c) except the tests tagged as expensive. Selectors can be defined with different methods, see (info "(ert)Test Selectors") or https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/ert/Test-Selectors.html If your test file contains the tests "test-foo", "test2-foo" and "test-foo-remote", and you want to run only the former two tests, you could use a regexp: "make SELECTOR='\"foo$$\"'" . ** Understanding Emacs Internals. The best way to understand Emacs Internals is to read the code, but the nodes "Tips" and "GNU Emacs Internals" in the Appendix of the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual may also help. Some source files, such as xdisp.c, have large commentaries describing the design and implementation in more detail. The file etc/DEBUG describes how to debug Emacs bugs. *** Non-ASCII characters in Emacs files If you introduce non-ASCII characters into Emacs source files, it is a good idea to add a 'coding' cookie to the file to state its encoding. Please use the UTF-8 encoding unless it cannot do the job for some good reason. As of Emacs 24.4, it is no longer necessary to have explicit 'coding' cookies in *.el files if they are encoded in UTF-8, but other files need them even if encoded in UTF-8. However, if an *.el file is intended for use with older Emacs versions (e.g. if it's also distributed via ELPA), having an explicit encoding specification is still a good idea. *** Useful files in the admin/ directory See all the files in admin/notes/* . In particular, see admin/notes/newfile, see admin/notes/repo. The file admin/MAINTAINERS records the areas of interest of frequent Emacs contributors. If you are making changes in one of the files mentioned there, it is a good idea to consult the person who expressed an interest in that file, and/or get his/her feedback for the changes. If you are a frequent contributor and have interest in maintaining specific files, please record those interests in that file, so that others could be aware of that. *** git vs rename Git does not explicitly represent a file renaming; it uses a percent changed heuristic to deduce that a file was renamed. So if you are planning to make extensive changes to a file after renaming it (or moving it to another directory), you should: - create a feature branch - commit the rename without any changes - make other changes - merge the feature branch to trunk, _not_ squashing the commits into one. The commit message on this merge should summarize the renames and all the changes. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see . Local variables: mode: outline paragraph-separate: "[ ]*$" end: